Humphrey Carpenter was an English biographer, broadcaster and musician, born in 1946, one of the most accomplished literary biographers of his generation.
The son of a Bishop of Oxford, and Oxford-educated, he combined a prolific writing career with work as a radio presenter and a genuine second life as a jazz musician - he founded a 1930s-style band, Vile Bodies, that held a residency at the Ritz. But it is for his biographies that he is chiefly remembered.
He wrote the authorised life of J.R.R. Tolkien, still the standard biography, and followed it with The Inklings, a group portrait of Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and their Oxford circle, which won the Somerset Maugham Award; he also edited Tolkien's Letters. Beyond Middle-earth his subjects ranged widely and boldly - the poets W. H. Auden and Ezra Pound, the composer Benjamin Britten, the comedian Spike Milligan - and, in a lighter vein, he delighted young readers with the Mr Majeika books about a hapless wizard.
Elegant, sympathetic and impressively versatile, he did as much as anyone to shape how readers understand Tolkien and his world; he died in 2005.
